Yusuf/Cat Stevens on his “Road to Findout”

“You have to admit, I’ve been misunderstood,” said singer-songwriter Yusuf Islam. “Even when I wrote ‘Foreigner,’ I started with the words, There are no words I can use because the meaning still leaves for you to choose. And so, the artist, to try and explain himself, has got to work a bit harder.”

In a way, music was a by-product of a lifelong search, says Islam (also known as Cat Stevens), who met with us backstage in London. 

I asked, “Do you get something out of playing on stage that you don’t, playing alone?”

“I get scared,” he replied. “A lot of human beings out there!”

But this musical giant who got his start in the 1960s, and is now in his late 70s, can still move a crowd. 

Nicole Perry Ellis came to London’s Hyde Park with her daughter Natasha to attend a Yusuf concert. She described it as a “very emotional moment. Because before [Natasha] was born, we used to listen to the music when I was pregnant.”

Natasha described Yusuf as timeless: “He has spirit, he has soul, and it transcends.”

“I think my songs have always been kind of profound in some way,” Yusuf said. “A lot of them are so relevant to the world today. I mean, ‘Wild World’? You know, come on! And ‘Peace Train,’ waiting for the train to arrive. Boy, do we need it, yeah. I mean they’re relevant.”

His core themes have endured, as his name has gone through its evolutions. “I had a girlfriend who looked at me one day and said, ‘Ooh, you look like a cat.’ And I went, ‘What?’ That stuck. And then I was looking for a name, because it was going to be difficult to go into the record store and ask for, like, Stephen Demetre Georgiou’s latest album.”

“Do you think you would have been as successful as Stephen Demetre Georgiou?” I asked.

“There’s no … you can’t play with fate,” he replied.

In his new memoir, “Cat on the Road to Findout,” he explores family, faith, career, and ego.

He writes that reaching superstardom in his teens was quite difficult. “The problem with success is that it kind of detaches you from reality in some sense,” he said. “Who are you? Are you that person on the screen, on the stage, or is there something more to you? I was looking for some big answers.”

I asked, “What all did you try, spiritually?”

“Well, you know, the bookshop is full of lots of different views of life and beliefs and philosophies, so I was digging around everywhere. I think the most important thing was when I finally reached the Quran at the end. And that just brought everything together.”

He took the name Yusuf Islam, and – believing that music was haram, or forbidden – redirected his royalties to fund his charity efforts, auctioned off instruments, focused on family, and for nearly 30 years left music.

Why did he believe music was forbidden? “It took me time to realize that a lot of what I was told in the beginning when I became a Muslim was not exactly right,” he said. “You know, Islam doesn’t forbid anything that’s healthy and morally good.”

I asked, “How do you reconcile the you who put that aside, with the you who embraced music again?”

“You go through stages,” Yusuf said. “At one time you can fall in love, and next time you’re having such an argument with a person, you say, ‘What the hell, get out of my life!’ You know, you change, your attitude changes according to circumstance. Context is key.”

He provides context to a controversial chapter regarding Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses,” which inflamed the Muslim world – and the fatwa calling for the author’s death. In 1989, in an appearance on a British TV program where hypothetical questions were posed, he was asked if he’d attend an effigy burning of Rushdie, to which he replied, “I would have hoped that it would have been the real thing, but actually no, if it’s just an effigy I don’t think I would be that moved to go there.”

“I mean, I’ve got a British sense of humor,” Yusuf said. “I took it in a kind of slightly comical direction. It wasn’t a good thing to do, because nobody laughed. So, you know, I kind of, I made a mistake in thinking that people might get the joke. But it was a serious issue, so I shouldn’t have really done that.”

“The joke you mean, saying preferred the real thing, not the effigy?”

“Whatever, whatever, whatever.”

“When you saw the headlines after that, do you worry even today that – “

“Let’s get off this subject, please,” Yusuf said.

“You bring it up in the book, so it seems – “

“No, it was only a little part of the book.”

I said, “But it seems like with this book you partially wanted to set the record straight from your perspective.”

“That’s right,” Yusuf replied. “I think I’ve done that.”

I asked, “How is it to sit down and write something so personal, to go through the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful?”

“I left quite a lot of the ugly out, actually, to be honest!”

“You were hard on yourself.”

“Really? That’s nice to know. I tried to be honest in my writing of songs, and in the writing of my book.” 

This singer-songwriter who once gave up fame for faith has now found his balance, performing as Yusuf/Cat Stevens.

Asked how it is to be performing using both names, Yusuf/Cat Stevens replied, “Actually, it’s very symbolic in a way, because for a long time what I wanted to do was to separate myself in a way from my past, and I did that. So, joining these two names together actually forms the complete picture of, like, who I am. And you just have to listen to the songs. They’re biographical in themselves. I didn’t have to write a book, actually. You just buy the records, you know?”

WEB EXCLUSIVE: Extended Interview – Yusuf/Cat Stevens (Video)

     
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Story produced by Mikaela Bufano. Editor: Brian Robbins.